Frank Vignola is an academic expert in physics, specifically solar radiation. At the University of Oregon, Frank is the director of the University of Oregon Solar Radiation Monitoring Laboratory. The lab runs a 30 station solar monitoring network in the Pacific Northwest. Frank and his team developed a solar lab kit with lesson plans for local schools. Solar resource measurements are used to estimate the performance of solar systems. The lab has the longest record of direct normal and total solar radiation in the United States. This information can be used to look at the long-term variation of the solar resource and should provide a stringent test for climate models that try to predict local climate.
Frank is past chair of the American Solar Energy Society technical advisory committee and produced several whitepapers on solar technologies.
During the eclipse, they will have solar radiation monitoring stations in Madras and Salem that will be monitoring the incident solar radiation and the data are uploaded to the web once a minute. They plan to conduct some experiments in Madras using an instrument that measures circumsolar irradiance.
Contact: fev@uoregon.edu | 541-683-2695, 541-346-4745
Website: http://solardata.uoregon.edu
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